{"id":6008,"date":"2019-01-26T13:16:36","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T18:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6008"},"modified":"2019-01-26T13:16:36","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T18:16:36","slug":"what-is-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6008","title":{"rendered":"What is Gone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been going to a writing group about loss.\u00a0 <\/span>I wrote this at the third meeting.\u00a0 <\/span>But it was a clumsy scramble, and brought up contradictions that I didn\u2019t have time to explore.\u00a0 <\/span>I want to explore the whole process of dismantling a negative belief.<\/p>\n

The prompt was \u201cWhat is gone?\u00a0 <\/span>And what remains?\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>and I wrote:\u00a0 \u201c<\/span>What is gone is the feeling of being loved.\u00a0 <\/span>I only felt it once when Dana hugged me in the kitchen of my house in Brunswick.\u00a0 <\/span>He flung his arms around me and said \u201cI love you so much.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I felt like I had come into a warm room from a cold snowy long trek alone through a freezing desert.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there were a number of experiences that led up to my being able to feel loved.\u00a0 <\/span>I used to think to myself \u201cNobody ever loved me and nobody ever will.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>It was true that I never felt loved by my parents.\u00a0 <\/span>But I didn\u2019t know that.\u00a0 <\/span>What I wanted was a boyfriend, and what I meant by \u201clove\u201d was that the boyfriend would love me.\u00a0 <\/span>Unknown to myself I believed that if I had a boyfriend I would feel OK about myself, it would \u201cprove that I deserve to live<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until I was 30 that I said out loud in the presence of a friend:\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cNobody ever loved me and nobody ever will.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>At the time I meant \u201cno man has ever loved me.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>That was my very narrow belief about \u201clove.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>But my friend Trudy said \u201cWhat about me?\u00a0 <\/span>I<\/strong> love you!\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I didn\u2019t feel loved, it conflicted so totally with that old belief.\u00a0 <\/span>But the scientist in me created a page \u201cEvidence to disprove the hypothesis that Jenny is unlovable,\u201d and began a list.\u00a0 <\/span>1. Trudy loves me.\u00a0 <\/span>When I said the same thing in front of my friend Ron, he said \u201cWhat about me?\u00a0 <\/span>I<\/strong> love you.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>So I added 2. Ron loves me.\u00a0 <\/span>But I didn\u2019t feel it.\u00a0 <\/span>I added names of people I knew loved me.\u00a0 <\/span>I recited them to myself on a regular basis.\u00a0 <\/span>I stopped saying \u201cNobody ever loved me and nobody ever will.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>It was after that, that I met Dana, married him, moved to Franconia.\u00a0 <\/span>But gradually our lives went in different directions.\u00a0 <\/span>When we finally divorced, I thought we would stay friends but he cut me right out of his life.\u00a0 <\/span>That hurt more than the divorce.\u00a0 <\/span>I began to realize that he was not the person I thought he was.\u00a0 <\/span>Once the memory of that hug in the kitchen could reawaken the warm feeling, but that had finally disappeared.<\/p>\n

Writing and thinking about it brought back the memory of my friend Rose Marie, another friend I met while I lived in Brunswick.\u00a0 <\/span>She would often say \u201cOh I love you!\u201d after I had done some stupid little Jenny thing, something small but that was very individual.\u00a0 <\/span>It surprised me so much, and her tone of voice was one I had never heard before, it sounded like she was enjoying me being me.\u00a0 <\/span>I think it somehow cut through all my negative stuff about being loved.\u00a0 <\/span>It was my first inkling that I didn\u2019t have to do something spectacular to be loved.<\/p>\n

A number of years after the divorce, in the same year, two friends flung their arms around me and said \u201cI love you so much.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I remember thinking at the time that it was the direct antidote to that loss of feeling so warm and welcomed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been going to a writing group about loss.\u00a0 I wrote this at the third meeting.\u00a0 But it was a clumsy scramble, and brought up contradictions that I didn\u2019t have time to explore.\u00a0 I want to explore the whole process … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,11,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healing","category-journal","category-present-day","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}